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Tervita IPO in the offing?

Sources suggest that the newly-rebranded energy services company could be looking to raise as much as $1 billion in a public offering later this year

When he was younger, Max Fawcett wanted to make a mint in the markets. Now as the managing editor of Alberta Venture he gets to write about them. Close enough, right? He can be reached at mfawcett@albertaventure.com

Jul 16, 2012

by Max Fawcett

After a successful re-branding campaign that saw the former CCS Corp. transformed into Tervita, the company is apparently looking to go public – again. So says the Globe and Mail’s Tim Kiladze, who cites unnamed sources in writing that “despite rocky equity markets and a volatile oil price, Tervita hopes to launch a large initial public offering in the coming months. Final details are still being hashed out.”

When it happens, the IPO could end up generating anywhere between $500 million and $1 billion, which would make it the biggest Canadian IPO in more than two years. The $1 billion figure does come from a Bloomberg story that curiously identifies the company as a “provider of waste management services” (it does much more than that) but it also claims to have two different sources backing up the estimated size of the IPO. The Globe’s Kiladze, meanwhile, cautions that the market may not be entirely co-operative – last year, for example, Gibson Energy had to reduce the price on its IPO in order to get the deal done with its investment bankers.

Still, regardless of the size of the eventual Tervita IPO, it seems clear that the company wants to go public again after co-founder David Werklund and a group of private equity partners (including Goldman Sachs Capital Partners and the British Columbia Investment Management Corporation) took it private in 2007 for $3.5 billion.